“Woe to you who desire the day of the Lord!
Why would you have the day of the Lord?
It is darkness, and not light,
as if a man fled from a lion,
and a bear met him,
or went into the house and leaned his hand against the wall,
and a serpent bit him.
Is not the day of the Lord darkness, and not light,
and gloom with no brightness in it?
“I hate, I despise your feasts,
and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.
Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings,
I will not accept them;
and the peace offerings of your fattened animals,
I will not look upon them.
Take away from me the noise of your songs;
to the melody of your harps I will not listen.
But let justice roll down like waters,
and righteousness like a wadi that never dries up.”—Amos 5:18-24 (ESV, alteration mine)Thus says the Lord:
“For three transgressions of Israel
and for four, I will not revoke the punishment,
because they sell the righteous for silver,
and the needy for a pair of sandals—
those who trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth
and turn aside the way of the afflicted;
a man and his father go in to the same girl,
so that my holy name is profaned;
they lay themselves down beside every altar
on garments taken in pledge,
and in the house of their God they drink
the wine of those who have been fined.”—Amos 2:6-8 (ESV)It can be tempting to take verses like Amos 5:21—“I hate, I despise your feasts, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies”—as if we can just lift them right out of Amos and apply them to the church today, or to parts of the church we don’t like. Certainly, we may feel, there are an awful lot of churches whose worship can’t possibly be pleasing to God—and this is the word of God, so it applies to us just as it did to Amos’ neighbors in Tekoa; it’s tempting to rise up in the prophet’s place and pronounce the damnation of God on all that we see is wrong in the church. It is, however, a temptation which must be resisted, for our own sakes; it must be resisted because it’s an abuse of the Scripture, and it’s abuse of the Scripture that opens the door to all the other abuses we see in the church. It must also be resisted because it leads us away from humility, and into the trap of spiritual pride.Amos 5 does indeed say something very important about worship, something which clearly applies to us today—but it doesn’t say that God hates all the worship offered him by the Western church, or that all the services and conferences and organizations and rallies are despicable to him. Some of them no doubt are; but this is not a blanket condemnation, except for those who are guilty of the sins of which Amos condemned his contemporaries. To understand why he denounces their worship so powerfully, we need to understand what he’s denouncing. We need to understand the real problem.First off, to be clear, the problem wasn’t that Israel wasn’t worshiping God, or that they weren’t doing so correctly. It’s not that they weren’t a religious people—by any standard, they were considerably more religious than we are. God doesn’t complain that they weren’t showing up to church. They were keeping up their duties, showing up to the temple on the great holy days, offering their sacrifices, playing their music, and so on; they knew the stuff they were supposed to be doing, and they were doing it—all the right words at all the right times, all the right sacrifices done all the right ways, all down pat.The problem wasn’t what they were doing—the problem was why. Their worship may have been directed to God, but it wasn’t about God, it was about them; specifically, it was about dotting all the “i”s and crossing all the “t”s necessary to get what they wanted from God, keeping up their end of the bargain so that God would have to keep up his. That’s why, just to make sure they had all their bases covered, they didn’t just worship the one true God, they worshiped a number of other gods, too—being quite sure, no doubt, to get all those forms just right as well. Of course, the Bible calls that idolatry, and makes it quite clear that God won’t stand for it; but his people just didn’t see the problem. After all, wasn’t it all about getting their needs met? If worshiping another god or two on the side helped them get their needs met, why should God mind?This attitude bore all kinds of bad fruit. God is just, and his law set high standards for how the rich and powerful were to treat the poor and vulnerable, and yet his people felt free to come to worship with the blood of injustice on their hands, as we see both in Amos 5 and in Amos 2 (and in fact in lots of places throughout the prophets). The people of Israel thought they could buy God’s favor by showing up at the temple at the scheduled time and going through the motions, then go back into the “real world” and do business however they pleased. They didn’t understand that real worship begins with surrender—with giving over to God our plans, our ideas, our desires, our fears, our dreams, our visions, our conceptions of justice, our expectations of mercy, our wants, even our needs, and saying, “This is what I would do, but your will be done”; they just wanted to show up on Saturday morning, go through the motions, and walk off with the assurance that God was happy with them for showing up and would, in consequence, give them whatever they might happen to ask for.And that, God says, is false worship, and I loathe it. “I hate, I despise your festivals; I take no delight in your church services. Take away your sacrifices—it makes me sick to look at them. Stop singing and put down your instruments—I can’t stand to listen to your noise.” All their worship was just an empty, cynical production; they were keeping up the shell of their religion, the ritual and the outward conformity, but without any reality at the center—and it made God madder than if they’d never bothered to show up at all. They shouldn’t have bothered, because they were essentially committing religious fraud, and God can’t and won’t tolerate that. Instead of all their show, what he wanted, and what he wants from us, is what he’s wanted all along: for his people to live lives of worship, for what we say in church on Sunday to be reflected at work on Monday.He declares this in one of the most powerful and striking verses in the Bible: “Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like a wadi that never dries up.” “Stream” doesn’t really capture the point here; as one commentator put it, “A wadi in the Middle East is a narrow valley, often a deep channel, through which rapid torrents of water gush during the rainy season, but which may have only a trickle of water or be completely dry in the summer.” When it flows, it brings life and color to the land, which then returns to desert when it dries up. But where a real wadi would flow only sometimes, God calls for justice and righteousness to be like a wadi that never stops flowing, but pours out ceaselessly in a mighty, thunderous flood, bringing life to the nation.Now, in tying true worship to justice and righteousness, is Amos saying that the purpose of worship is to change our behavior? No; but true worship will, nonetheless. Worship brings us into the presence of God to focus on his character, on his beauty, and on all that he has done in creating this world and in saving us as his people—and the more time we spend looking at God, the more we will desire God, and thus desire his holiness. Worshiping God transforms us; spending time focusing our attention on God changes our priorities, our preferences, and our outlook on the world. It’s a gradual change, to be sure, not something that happens overnight, but no less real for all that; the proof of the pudding, so to speak, is whether our daily life, as individuals and as a community of believers, demonstrates and reflects the justice and righteousness of God. When that isn’t in evidence—as it wasn’t among Amos’ fellow Israelites—it’s a sign that however highly we might think of it, there’s something wrong with our worship.Unfortunately, we don’t look at our worship the same way God does. We don’t judge our worship by whether or not our lives are characterized by justice and righteousness, or whether they look like the picture Paul paints in Colossians 3; we don’t examine our hearts to see if we, like the Israelites, are guilty of idolatry, worshiping our false gods of money, pleasure, ambition, and self-fulfillment right alongside the one true God. Instead, we ask, did we have a meaningful worship experience?—Did we enjoy the music?—Did we get something out of it?—Did it move us?—as if whether we found it meaningful was all that mattered, as if this is all about us. When those are the only questions we ask—when our only concerns about our worship are for ourselves and our own opinions and desires—we’ve gone off the rails. Our worship is about God, and what matters first and foremost is whether he is pleased, whether we’ve been focused on praising him, giving him glory, doing him honor; if not, if our concern is more for ourselves and what we think and feel than for God, then we aren’t really worshiping him at all.The bottom line of our worship is this: God calls us to gather together as his people to praise his name, to honor him as our God, to hear him speak to us through his word, to confess our sins and affirm our faith, to lay our needs before him in prayer—and to go out again resolved and empowered to live out his justice and righteousness in a lost and broken world so loved by God. He calls us to take everything we have—yes, even our pain, even our struggles, even our anger, even our grief, just as much as our joy and our faith, our money and our talents—and give it to him, give it completely to him, as our offering. He calls us to give up trying to bless ourselves—let him take care of that!—and instead to bless his name with everything we have, with our words and with our lives, because he is worth it. He’s worth everything we have, and everything we are, and far, far more. If we understand worship in this way, if we seek to worship God in this way, it will change us, and it will change how we live; and so the proof of our worship, if you will, is in the fruit.When are we justified in applying Amos 5:21 to the worship of the church? When the life of the church looks like Amos 2.
